The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
When a client device, such as a PC, prints to a printing device, such as a printer, a print subsystem on the client device processes print data generated by an application program on the client device, converts the print data into a format supported by the printing device, and sends the converted print data to the printing device, which then prints the print data. For example, a user creates an electronic document using a word processing application on a PC. The user then selects a print option in the word processing application to request that the electronic document be printed to a particular printer. The print subsystem on the PC processes this request by processing the print data for the electronic document, converting the print data into a format supported by the particular printer, and sends the converted print data to the particular printer. Generally, converted print data is sent to a printing device as part of a print job that is recognized by the printing device.
To perform these steps, which result in the printing device processing the submitted print job, the print subsystem on the client device usually makes use of a print driver, which includes processes that process print data generated by an application program and convert the print data into a format supported by the printing device. Conventionally, print drivers are specific to each printing device. That is, each print driver converts print data into a format supported by a particular printing device. Therefore, in order for a client device to print to a particular printing device, the client device must have installed on it the print driver for the particular printing device.
The steps that need to be performed in order to ensure that a client device has installed the appropriate print drivers—that is, the print drivers that correspond to the printing devices to which users of the client device wish to print to—may be tedious and onerous. For example, while print drivers are usually provided on storage media when a printing device is purchased, users do not have access to print drivers for printing devices not purchased by the users via storage media. Although print drivers may also be downloaded from the Internet, a user may not have access to the Internet when the user wishes to print to a particular printing device. Furthermore, if a printing device is updated with new capabilities or firmware, an older version of the print driver for the printing device may no longer be compatible with the updated printing device, necessitating the installation of a new print driver that is compatible with the updated printing device.